“This isn’t about me wanting to take your kids, and this isn’t even about whether children are property. This is about whether we as a society, expressing our collective will through our public institutions, including our government, have a right to impinge on individual freedoms in order to advance a common good. And that is exactly the fight that we have been having for a couple hundred years.”

Response: MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry is responding above to those who were critical of the following statement she made in an ad for her new show:

"We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children … We haven’t had a very collective notion of ‘these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that ‘kids belong to their parents,’ or ‘kids belong to their families,’ and recognize that kids belong to whole communities."

The statement went viral and caused a firestorm on the right. Now she has come back with a comment that may be even more offensive since it puts the first statement in a context that really does represent the current thinking on the left. Particularly in academia where Harris-Perry came from. I believe it also represents the thinking of many in the Obama administration.

Point is, while we still do have a Constitution with a Bill of Rights defining our individual and corporate freedoms in this country, many of those rights are now being challenged by a leftist progressive agenda. There are far more folks in America that are willing to ‘impinge’ upon our freedoms than many realize. especially if is is supposedly for the ‘common good.’ Not only that but the so-called ‘Common good’ is in the process of being redefined by the same progressive agenda.

In fact, the number of Americans willing to forego some or part of our freedoms is increasing exponentially with every new class of young minds of mush being exposed to the continual propaganda from the left which mostly defines the current environment at colleges and universities across America.

We have been writing and warning about this trend for some time now. Particularly when it comes to religious freedom. Some have called us ‘alarmist’ but I rather view it as fulfilling a call to be a ‘watchman on the wall.’

The greatest current demonstration of what we are talking about is the Obama Administration’s HHS Contraceptive/abortifacient Mandate. By this executive fiat, the Obama administration is attempting to force allied religious organizations and business owners to compromise on their religious principals and conscience for the ‘common good’ of women employees. But most Americans just do not get it. They don’t perceive it as a problematic erosion of religious freedom but see it as a ‘common good’ that ends up providing thousands of women with ‘free’ contraceptives. While the conservative and religious opposition has been successfully cast by the media and the administration as waging a ‘war against women’ –particularly poor women.

Meanwhile, hundreds of religious leaders have spoken against it but their objections have substantially fallen on deaf ears. At least it seemed that way from the results of the last election. Now it is in the hands of judges some of which have been chosen by the Obama administration in the last 5 years and most of which have come out of academia and law school with a progressive mindset.

One wonders where we will end up in the next ten years since so many changes have happened in the last ten. Will our freedoms and rights still be intact? Or will the trends to nibble away at our Constitution continue for the ‘common good?’ Will Americans be persuaded to give up some of their rights for safety and security if terrorism continues? That also is a real and present danger to our current freedoms.

We cannot know how all of this will play out but I do expect the trend to continue. It is amazing to me how many Americans would be willing to surrender some of their hard fought freedoms right now for one cause or another. If you doubt what I am saying, here are a couple of incredible examples:

Both of these petitions were shams but the participants did not realize it.

Anyway we are at a crossroads in America whether we know it or not and it is time for people of good will to stand up and be counted. It is also a good time for Christians to pray for the future of America. *Top